Sighing heavily, she glanced up from the sonnet she’d been reading just in time to see Lancelot spring into the tree above her with surprising agility for a cat his size and age.
“Lancelot, no!” she shouted futilely, as he landed on a limb high above her head. “Lancelot, you know you’re terrified of heights. Now what are you going to do?”
She shook her head as the cat uttered a pathetic meow.
“You got yourself up there,” she reminded him unsympathetically. “Now get yourself down.”
Lancelot seemed to shiver, then meowed again more loudly. He sounded pitiful, far too pitiful to ignore.
“Okay. Okay. I’m coming,” she said resignedly, dropping her book onto the tablecloth and hiking up her skirt. She shinnied up the tree in the awkward, uneasy manner of someone who’d done this often in the past but never grown accustomed to it. To be perfectly truthful, she wasn’t one bit fonder of heights than Lancelot was. To top it off, the minute she got near him, the cat backed out of her reach. “Lancelot, how can I rescue you if you keep moving away from me?”
She tested the strength of the limb and shifted until her body rested along the length of it. Stretching as far as she could, she tried again to grab the cat, whose cries had grown more shrill. Taking a deep breath, Victoria crept another few inches. “Here, Lancelot. Come on, fellow,” she whispered encouragingly, just as she heard the branch creak and felt it waver beneath her. The tremor shook her confidence and her patience. “Lancelot, get over here right this minute!”
The cat didn’t budge, but the limb dipped precariously and Victoria glanced nervously down at the ground. It seemed much farther away than she’d remembered. Clinging tightly to the branch while she tried to decide whether to risk a retreat or spend the next fifty years of her life right here living on bark, acorns and oak leaves, she looked off in the distance and spotted the welcome sight of someone heading in her direction.
With his determined, long-legged stride and squared jaw, the unfamiliar man looked like someone with a definite and probably unpleasant mission. Even from this distance and this crazy, sort of upside-down angle, she could tell he was physically impressive. His broad shoulders, beneath a pale blue shirt that was shadowed with perspiration, were obviously well formed and muscular. The tan slacks were slung low on slim hips, the fit emphasizing the curve of his thighs, the length of his powerful legs. His tie was askew, and he was carrying a tan jacket slung over his shoulder. He was definitely not dressed like someone who’d planned to go for a stroll in the country.
She shaded her eyes and squinted into the sun, studying what she could make out of the chiseled features of his face and the dark brown hair that needed cutting. Her breath caught in her throat.
“Good Lord, if I’m dreaming, don’t let me wake up,” she murmured under her breath as he approached, his expression growing puzzled as he noted the tablecloth, the picnic basket and the book.
“Hi,” she said cheerfully, trying to keep a nervous tremor out of her voice. The last crack of the limb had tilted it until her head seemed nearly perpendicular to the blanket. As soft as the ground had seemed when she’d been sitting on it, she had no particular desire to land on it headfirst and test its resiliency.
Startled by the husky, whispered greeting, Tate McAndrews looked around for the person whose entrancing voice had seemed to come to him from the heavens.
“Up here.”
He gazed up and stared into a pair of very wide, very blue eyes that glinted with suppressed laughter. His heart took an unexpected lurch.
“Hi, yourself,” he said, his irritation at the rotten way the day had gone suddenly vanishing in the presence of such unabashed, impish humor. Perhaps this wild-goose chase he’d been sent on would have an unexpected dividend after all. “Do you always perch in trees after lunch?”
“Hardly,” she said with a grimace that wrinkled her pert nose in a delightful way. “By the way, my name’s Victoria Marshall and I’m very glad to see you. I seem to have gotten myself into a bit of a predicament.”
Tate groaned and a pained expression replaced the quirk of amusement that had played about his lips. So much for any thoughts of pleasant diversions. His wild-goose chase had ended. “I should have known,” he muttered.
“Is something wrong?”
He shook his head. “No. In fact, I was looking for you.”
“You were? Do I know you?”
“Not yet, but you will,” he mumbled ominously. “I’m Tate McAndrews. Internal Revenue Service.”
Usually people panicked at the mere mention of the IRS, but Tate had to give Victoria Marshall credit. She didn’t even flinch.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said brightly and with such sincerity that Tate had to believe she had no idea what he was doing here. “But do you suppose you could help me get down before we continue this conversation? My head is beginning to spin.”
“What are you doing up there in the first place?”
“Lancelot saw a squirrel.”
“Lancelot? A squirrel?” He felt strangely light-headed, as though he were rapidly losing the capability of rational thought. It was either this unseasonably warm weather or this perky woman he’d discovered hanging upside down in a tree with her skirt hitched up in a decidedly provocative way. He preferred to think it was the weather.
“Lancelot is my cat. He’s twelve and he mostly just lazes around now, but a squirrel will get to him every time.”
“I see.” Actually Tate didn’t see at all. But he was beginning to understand that this assignment that Pete Harrison had foisted off on him was not going to be quite as easy and straightforward as he’d anticipated. He berated himself for not guessing that any woman who would demand that the IRS send her a refund for 15,593.12 more than she had paid in taxes was not exactly your run-of-the-mill evader. She was a kook. Everything that had happened in the last few minutes only confirmed the fact. She might be very attractive in an offbeat sort of way, but she was a kook nonetheless.
Still, she was also up in the tree, and he couldn’t wrap up this absurd business about the refund until she came down. It would probably be best if she didn’t do it headfirst and shake any more of her screws loose.
“Let go of the branch,” he suggested.
“Are you crazy?” she replied in a horrified, hushed whisper, her eyes widening as the branch tipped a bit more. “I’m twelve feet off the ground. I’ll break every bone in my body.”
“Don’t worry. I’m going to catch you.”
“Then I’ll break every bone in your body.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he retorted. “Come on. Just let go and drop down.”
“But what about Lancelot?”
“I don’t think you need to worry about him,” Tate replied dryly.
Victoria followed his gaze and saw that the traitorous cat was sitting serenely in the middle of the tablecloth eating the last of the Gouda cheese. “Lancelot, how could you?” she muttered.
“You might as well jump.”
Sighing nervously, Victoria swung her legs around, allowing them to dangle as she clung tightly to the increasingly unsteady branch. She glanced down uneasily into Tate McAndrews’s upturned face. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay,” she said, closing her eyes as she let go. There was no point in looking. It was up to Tate McAndrews to make good on his promise to catch her. She tried to think of herself as weightless, a butterfly floating on air, but it wasn’t working. She felt as though she were plummeting like a rock. Her heart thudded against